Saturday, 28 April 2018

Now that SongKong can be completely controlled via a web browser this opens up the possibility for it be run on systems that do not have a monitor connected and hence can only be controlled remotely.

Network Attached Storage

The prime candidate for this is Network Attached Storage (NAS) machines.

A NAS unit is a computer connected to a network that mainly provides file-based data storage services to other devices on the network.
But it is not justa simple hard drive, it usually runs a version of linux and can run other software. But it is usually not designed to be a general-purpose server. NAS units usually do not have a keyboard or display, and are
controlled and configured over the network using a web browser

Docker

There are may different NAS's on the market, each having different requirements for packaging and installing applications.

Docker is a way of packaging applications so that they can work over a variety of different platforms without having to repackage each application for every environment.

First Docker File for Synology NAS

SongKong customer Nathan Howell has kindly created a docker image for SongKong, and it is freely available from https://hub.docker.com/r/nathanhowell/songkong/Now, lets be clear I have not yet used Docker so this is all new to me, but if you do know what you are doing this should work for you.We will be working on making an official docker version and checking how it works on different NAS systems.

Thursday, 26 April 2018

SongKong 5.3 released today with improved Delete Duplicates and some bug fixes.

Album based Delete Duplicates Report

Finding duplicates is still done at song level but now the Delete Duplicates report is usually organized by Album Artist and Album making it much easier to understand.At the top level is the Album Artist and then this can be expanded to show each Album that SongKong has found duplicates for, these in turn can be expanded to see the duplicate files.

Duplicates will be organized Album/Artist if Song is a Duplicate If is album based. However if it is just song based such as Same MusicBrainz Song Only then it will be displayed by Track Artist

Below we see the result of Delete Duplicates on the same folders when using Same MusicBrainz Song Only.

Notice that having found 9 duplicates for album Prince, it has found 8 duplicates for track artist Prince, and one duplicate for track artist Prince with Sheena Easton.

Bit Depth added as Preferred Deletion Criteria

The Preferred Deletion Criteriais used to decide the file to delete when duplicates have been found. We already supported choosing the preferred audio format, so for example you could prefer aif instead of wav. But what happensif in some cases the wav file was a 24 bit hi res file and the aif file was a regular 16 bit file, and in other cases the aif file was the 24 bit version ?

Now you can specify the Bit Depth as a criteria to ensure Hi-Res files are always kept.

Add Audio Fields to Edit Songs

We have now added audio read only fields to the Filename tab to help customers with song identification. The fields added are Audio Bits per Sample (Bit Depth), Audio Sample Rate and Audio Bit Rate

Thursday, 19 April 2018

SongKong 5.2 - Now with Free Manual Metadata Support

We are pleased to announce the latest version of SongKong with some major new features:

Manual Metadata Editing

Status Report

Support for reading the user edits made with Naim App for Naim Wav rips

Also SongKong Trial has now become SongKong Lite and we are offering manual metadata editing and the status report completely free as part as of SongKong Lite.We have now simplified SongKong/SongKong for Melco so the same download can be used and then the extra features of the Melco release are activated by simply installing the Melco license.

Manual Metadata Editing

The concept behind SongKong is that your songs can be identified automatically, and
this gives you get a complete and consistent music library. However we
realize that 100% music identification is not quite a reality for most of us just yet so SongKong
also provides manual metadata editing as well.

Although there are tagger editors already available we realized that none of these allow you to tag remotely via a web browser, but Songkong now does. This is very useful if you have
SongKong running on a less accessible machine such as a linux server.

If you are already using SongKongs remote matching then you can use a single
application for all your music metadata tasks, and manual edit understands the
same fields as automatic edit so there are no comparability problems.

After each manual edit session SongKong saves all changes to a database so that you can use Undo Fixes in exactly
the same way as you can do for automatic edits, and SongKongcreates a report so you have an audit record
of exactly what has been changed.

Status Report

Before when you ran Fix Songs it created a spreadsheet showing all your metadata, but how do you get a snapshot of the metadata before Fix Songs has made any changes ?The Status Report creates the spreadsheet showing exactly what metadata you currently have for your chosen folder, so you can take a snapshot of your metadata before making any changes.

But it does more that that.It also has a Metadata Completeness summary, creating a bar chart showing the percentage of songs that have a given metadata field such as Album, Artist or in fact any of over one hundred fields, plus the percentage of songs that have album art of at least user defined quality. The metadata fields to be calculated are configurable.

Naim User Edit Rips

The Naim UnitiServe is a hi-end cd ripper and library store. When
you use it to rip a CD the UnitiServe rips to Wav format, it then looks
up metadata from the All Music Guide or Cddb but this metadata is stored in a file
called amginfo.xml or cddbinfo.txt within the same folder
as the Wav rips for the album rather than stored within the Wav files
themselves. If you edit your music using the Naim App then these edits
are stored in a UserEdits.xml file.
SongKong with a Melco license could already embed the amginfo.xml and cddbinfo.txt metadata into the .wav files themselves, but now with this release it can also embed user edits.